So Submits This Devil

• I don't know if you can tell, but since last Sunday my Venture Bros mania is back in full swing. Go watch the new episode 'cause you can't wait either.

• I am at the moment coming down from the first genuine shoe high I've been on since the heyday of Nike SB. (Wale, on that track "The Hype" on that mixtape I've been telling you about, puts it around 2005.) I just copped some gently-used loafers from a secondhand store for well under fifty American dollars. Given that I've been seeking out precisely such a pair of shoes for almost a year now, and that I'd get less utility out of and spend more on a tank of gas, I'd say it was a sound purchase. To celebrate, I prepared for myself a light, healthy repast.

• I just watched Mailer on Mailer. I've been thinking about making a (non Bird Turds) comic strip featuring him, so I figured a movie wherein Mailer discusses his life and work at length would be worth watching. Like, if I'm going to fictionalize him in my own stupid crap, I was thinking, I probably ought to expose myself to a broader swath of his intellect than just The Fight, which is the Mailer work I find most enjoyable probably just because it deals with subject matter that I'm already all nuts about. This movie I just saw, though, basically just reinforced what I already kind of thought about Mailer: his true value as an author is that his occasionally impossibly grandiose statements are perfect for taking and presenting in a new context. Take the title of this post, for instance. I did.

• Wait wait wait. Hold the fuck on. Did Jay-Z just hijack a Lil Wayne beat in order to compare himself to a former poet laureate in the first line? Because that's what it sounds like to me.

(Also, and I'm not saying I know the future or nothin', I'm just saying. Who got you onto Charles Simic before his ass became the American poet laureate? I even put him on your mixtape. Shit.)

• Lately I've been reading this book Spook Country which is kind of the sequel - although I'm never sure that the word "sequel" should be applied to books - to this book that I love. Today I came across the following passage:

"'It implements finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations, on block-structured, adaptively refined rectangular grids.'"

Even typing it out just now has in no way helped me to understand what in the fuck that means. I called the Rai Chile, who is a math nerd, to see if he could help me out, but his stupid phone died before I could even tell him about it.